XIV What Constitutes the Jew?
One day when I made a perilous ascent to Keidansky's garret, barely escaping harm through boxes and barrels and darkness and things in the way, I found him hard at work on an article—this time in the English language—on "What Constitutes the Jew?" A kind and interested editor to whom I had the honor of introducing him, asked my discovery to write on the subject, and pleased with the suggestion he took it up. He motioned to an up-turned coal scuttle for a seat as I entered, and bade me take a Jewish paper and be quiet. While I waited he finished his essay. "I haven't any time to talk to you," he said, looking disconsolate and running his long fingers through his curly black hair: "I want to read you this thing I've just scribbled. There he goes again—" he broke off in despair, as the old man in the next attic began to chant the Psalms. "But I shall read louder than he does," said Keidansky, "I pay rent here—sometimes—and King David, the fruit vendor, in there, sha'n't put me down." I listened, and he read as follows:
"And after we have read about him in the comic weeklies, have seen him delineated in popular works of fiction, have observed him caricatured in various publications, have beheld him portrayed on the vaudeville stage and have heard from the slum student of the Ghetto; after we have visited a few money lenders—on important business—have heard our minister talk patronizingly of him, telling pityingly of how he hath a great past and possessed more than a few commendable qualities, and of how he was, alas! doomed to damnation because he would not accept the religion that he hath given to the world; after we have bought clothing in one of his stores, taken a personal peep at the Ghetto, met a reformed rabbi, conversed with a distant descendant of his people, read the polite charges of his friend, the anti-Semite, and gone down and made beautiful speeches before him prior to the election; I say even after we have done these things, or some of these things have happened to us, we must still ask the question: What constitutes the Jew?
"For, of a verity, he is so complex in his character, so heterogeneous in his general composition, so diverse in his activities, so many sided in his worldly and heavenly pursuits, so widely varying in his appearance, so wonderfully ubiquitous, and withal such a living contradiction, that even after we have made the above painful efforts to understand him, we are still at a loss to know—what we know about him.
"He represents one of the ancient races and yet is as up to date as any; he reaches deepest into the past and looks furthest into the future; he is the narrowest conservative and the most advanced radical; in religion he is the most dogmatic, sectarian, stationary, orthodox, and also the most liberal and universal reformer; he is a member of the feeblest and strongest people on earth; he has no land of his own and he owns many lands; his wealth is the talk and the envy of the world, and none is so poor as he; his riches have ever been magnified and exaggerated, his dire poverty ever overlooked. 'As poor as a Jew' would be a truer simile than the one now in use. He is the infamous Shylock, the money-lender, yet he borrows as much and more money than he lends to others, only he pays his debts and so there is no talk about it; Christians and others who borrow from him go to court, denounce him, call him Shylock, and give him several pounds of 'tongue,' though he asks not for flesh, because it is not 'kosher,' and because whatever he is he is never cruel. Come to think of it, what a fine thing the Shylock story has ever been for those who did not want to pay their debts!
"He loans money to kings, and the kings oppress the Jews; he is the great concentrator of wealth, and he is the Socialist and Anarchist working ardently for the abolition of the private ownership of wealth; he is eminently practical, and is ever among the world-forgetting dreamers, 'the great host of impracticables'; he has no fine arts of his own, and he carries off the highest prizes for his glorious contribution to the arts of the nations. Now he is exclusively confined to his own Hebrew, religious lore, believing that beyond it there are no heights to scale, no depths to fathom, and then he becomes a Georg Brandes, a great interpreter of the literatures of the world; his own literature is so Puritanical, so religious and chaste that there is hardly a single love song to be found therein, and then comes a Heinrich Heine. He is the slave of traditions and the first to break them; persecute him and he will die for the religion of his fathers; give him freedom and he will pity them for their crude conceptions and applaud Ingersoll; he is intensely religious and the rankest infidel; he condemns the theatre as being immoral, and he is the first to hail Ibsen and applaud him, even on the Yiddish stage; there is no one so clannish and so cosmopolitan as he is, and these contrasts can be multiplied to the abuse of time and space.
"If, then, he is everything and to be found anywhere, to be seen in all sorts of circumstances, in all walks of life and walking in so many diverse ways, making his way in such strongly contrasting conditions, how shall we know him? How shall we know what constitutes the Jew? He does not always abide in the Ghetto, and, things are coming to such a pass, that he rarely has the old Ghetto appearance. I suppose if our dear Mr. Zangwill had his own way he would fill the world with Ghettos. He could use them in his business. But perhaps the time is drawing nigh when we must have the books of Mr. Zangwill and other works of such excellence to preserve the most picturesque life of a unique people and save it from oblivion. The Ghetto walls are falling, falling.